Page 34 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

CHORUS: SON(G)

for two voices

Jack Foley

beginning

his first consciousness/was an immense nostalgia—an awareness/of
“passage”—
the universe is running down—always in the direction of increasing entropy—
the brutality of the word “tu-meur” be careful here is intelligence at work
self-hatred masochism—he spoke of the dog as “dominant”—
it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste
in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which,
again, could not be determined without pointing out in what manner language and
the human mind act and re-act on each other, and without retracing the
revolutions, not of literature alone, but like of society itself. —What of all these
“voices”?
The language poet orders “tongue”—
how can we look

to words?—how can we look?—the two
of us
stranded, touching, telling—
“I’m just beginning to reach the point where I—”
—what you’re objecting to in my poem is not its style but thought itself, its
shifts, its evasions, its magical ability to function in many contexts at once—
it was the rock star—nerves jangling—veins open—who could tell him anything?
the news /
paper
which had been folded over flat on the ground
yes/
terday is now
wide open—
the wind reads it—
To say that a poem is “about” self-consciousness is not to say that it is only about
self-consciousness. There may be poems which are “only” about poetry and
maybe ________
wrote some of them, but if so that is an extremely limited

conception
of poetry
Self-consciousness
is by its very nature expansive, passionate, interested, anxious to discover
resonances
of itself
at large in the world—
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